Operation: What the Probably-Not-Literal Hell
by JustCallMeEmrys
Summary: He probably wasn't back in Hell. That was good. But he was in the middle of the desert with no idea where to go, his back was killing him, and he was fairly certain he had missed his plans for that night by a solid few days. That was less good. Best to just pick a direction and start walking. His on-again, off-again immortality still protected him from death-by-dehydration, right?
1. Phase One

His first thought, when consciousness returned to snap at his toes and burn his shoulders, was _'Bollocks, I'm back in Hell.'_

If he was back in Hell, then he had to be in a really shitty part of it. It was hot, and dry, and the dirt he laid on was that awkward middle ground between comfortable and unbearable that was sure to drive anybody mad within a few short weeks.

It couldn't be Hell, though. The gravity was too… _clingy._ It dragged at every atom of his being, wrapping around his bones and keeping him firmly locked to the ground in a way that his domain never had. Gravity in Hell was more "friends-with-benefits" than "overbearing-significant-other"; it liked him, true, but it wouldn't hesitate to let him float away if he insisted on a little space.

Plus there was the lack of muffled screaming, an absence of drifting ash settling across his body, the missing scent of sulfur and decay, the empty space in his head where the whispers of his demons usually churned…

So probably not Hell, then.

Which was neat, but that meant that he had absolutely no idea where he was, or why his entire body ached, or why he felt like he had been dunked in _lava._

One thing at a time.

Opening his eyes would be good; a nice 'phase one' in Operation: What The Probably-Not-Literal Hell. That sounded like a plan.

So he did that, and instantly regretted it.

Light stabbed into his eyes, searing his corneas, his lenses, his _retinas_ …there really wasn't a part of his eyes that _didn't_ ache. He would say that his brain hurt, but he was fairly certain it was being used as a hockey puck at the moment. What else could explain the migraine-inducing rattling in his head?

Another problem: There was sand _everywhere._

That in and of itself wasn't that big of an issue. He was okay with sand. Beaches were nice, although after the day he'd had, he was beginning to have mixed feelings about them.

This wasn't a pretty little strip of sand, separating a parking-lot or grass from the Pacific Ocean. This was strip after strip after strip, stretching as far as he could see, until a purplish haze of distant mountains broke apart the pale blue of the cloudless sky. It was awful to look at, and made his stomach flip in a way he didn't quite care to interpret at the moment.

Honestly, he would have rather woken up in Hell.

At least he would know where he was in Hell. It was an instinctual thing, kind of like how a bird always knew which way was south. The Mortal Plane, Earth, _whatever—_ that was different. His direction sense was still nothing to scoff at, but it was like comparing a basketball to the moon.

Which meant he should probably stop lying about. Time to stand up, be an adult, and try to remember what wild party he had to have attended to end up out in the middle of the desert.

He felt like he was missing something.

Like his blazer, for starters.

It was gone. As was his shirt. He was more perturbed about the blazer than the shirt; he had _liked_ that one. That was mildly upsetting.

He could still feel his pants, though, which was even more upsetting. So it had been a wild night, but not the kind of wild he was most entertained by.

And where in the ever-loving _fuck_ were his shoes?

A problem that he had originally put on the backburner-emphasis on _burn_ -returned to his attention the moment he twitched.

Suns were hot, and could apparently be little shits, since they still saw fit to charbroil the one that had lit them millennia ago. Vindictive sons-of-bitches.

 _'_ _Ha! SUNS-of-bitches.'_ He paused. If _he_ was the one that had lit them, did that technically make them his children, and therefore make _him_ the bitch?

It was too early for such contemplation, and he was much too busy.

He pushed through the pain, looking down upon his torso in muted, detached horror. His flesh was _peeling,_ flaking off like the outer layers of an onion.

It reminded him of how he had looked directly after his Fall, when his skin had slowly cooked from the inside out, peeling away in an agony that lasted for decades. Because his Fall hadn't been as quick as a simple plummet. It had been long, and excruciating, and one of the more traumatizing events in his life. Time worked differently for a celestial creature. Seven days in Heaven lasted for millennia on Earth; a few minutes spanned centuries.

No, it wasn't time to dwell on that. That could wait for later, when he thought about how star-parentage was supposed to work, and whether or not he could claim them on his taxes. This wasn't his Fall. This was not him awakening from a very detailed acid trip, where he dreamt and hallucinated all of human history. The physical result of his Fall was a numb itch beneath his conjured flesh, the pain tempered by time. That horror was millennia in his past. This was new. A simple sunburn, and nothing more; something to be ignored until he could procure an entire factory's worth of aloe vera, and fill the pool with it.

So he did his best to ignore his peeling flesh, and the way it made his fingers shake and muscles coil at the memories and the phantom pains.

He hauled himself to his feet, and cursed his lack of shoes, because _damn_ that sand was hot. He was immortal, and the sand was normal sand, so it wasn't like it would do any lasting damage, but it still burnt the soles of his feet and made him grimace.

And _shit,_ could the sun _get_ any brighter? It was like it was taunting him, hanging up in the coolness of space, not disorientated at all because stars didn't do that. Its smugness irritated him. He would ground it, if he could, but that would just roast the planet, and he had a feeling not too many people would be very pleased with that. He could count himself among that number. Also, that wasn't actually how grounding worked, or so he'd been told.

He held up a hand to try and spare his eyes and lessen his headache, and to put a physical barrier between himself and the sun's gloating. All that did was stretch his burns, and remind him that gravity was still a thing that clung and dragged and _pulled_ at every part of him, even parts of him that didn't exist anymore.

 _'_ _Wait.'_

He craned his head around, and his heart leapt into his throat, sucker-punching his gag reflex so hard he almost vomited then and there. He was all for new experiences, but that wasn't one that he wanted, thanks.

Another thing he didn't want? He was staring right at them; two impossible objects that were somehow both innocent, and more smug than the sun that mocked him. He inspected every inch of both of them, from where they sprouted near his shoulder blades, all the way down to where the pinions brushed at his ankles.

He spread them, all twenty feet of them from end to end, just to make sure that they weren't a mirage or a hallucination or a dream. And _Hell's bells_ were they probably not any of those things, because coaxing them to move made his entire back and chest cramp and ache, long-forgotten and atrophied muscles suddenly forced to become active again in a way that they hadn't for years; the chump change of time when it came to him, but significant enough that what should have been a simple flex made him want to lie down and swear.

He held the stretch, hoping that his wings— _his freaking wings, what the SHIT_ —would stop screaming at him sometime this year. That, and he realized that he had no idea how to work them anymore. Muscle memory could only get him so far. It had been years since those muscles had had to remember _anything_ ; entire lifetimes, the length of which most couldn't fathom.

Lifetimes since he had been restrained. Lifetimes since he had screamed and thrashed as his back was carved into, muscles and tendons torn and bones shattered in an agony that had left him _begging_ —

No. Now wasn't the time for that. There was never time for that. There would be no remembering that later; just more shoving it down as far as it could go, and hoping that it would be another few decades before that came up again. Just a glance at a feather, and he knew that wouldn't be the case. Not anymore.

Still, he was the master at being evasive, and avoiding anything that even came close to emotional or mental vulnerability. He would shove that shit onto the backburner until it was black and charred and unrecognizable.

Maintaining what his in-denial brain refused to call anything _but_ a well-deserved stretch, he craned his neck skywards, towards where his instincts and memory told him the Silver City lay. _That_ was never something he would forget.

 _'_ _What?'_ He wanted to ask, but while his lips moved, the words refused to. His throat was bone dry, his lips cracked and tongue feeling like cotton-wrapped lead. So speaking wasn't going to happen. Luckily his Father wasn't one that needed the verbal word to get the message. His Father worked with thoughts, and feelings, and intent; all things that he had in spades, and was definitely prepared to throw around like half-priced ping-pong balls.

Unsurprisingly, he received no answer.

Wonderful. His Old Man couldn't have bothered to leave him a note, at least? Even a little "LOL, Punked"? Cool. Whatever.

No, he would figure this out on his own.

Right after he remembered how _exactly_ to get his wings to fold comfortably again.

After a long five minutes that he would never speak of again, filled with colorful swearing in a number of forgotten languages, he was finally at least marginally comfortable with how his wings rested against his back. His muscles still ached, and he felt like someone was trying to play the marimba on his scapulae, but it was acceptable. He had sufficient enough control, at least, to wrap them a bit around his shoulders, sparing his abused flesh from cooking any more.

Putting his back to the sun—more to protect his eyes from it than because he actually knew which way he was going—he set off at a meaningful shuffle. How he would have traded just about anything to simply _fly_. He could be back in his penthouse, sorting out whatever the hell had happened, within a few seconds; perhaps with a quick stop at a market to pick up that aloe vera. He would by lying if he said he hadn't thought about trying, but the idea of forcing himself into the air made him a bit nauseous. The way his body was still screaming at him, he doubted he could maintain even a shaky glide.

Again: No lasting damage if he were to fall during an attempt, but that shit would still hurt.

So walking it was, then. Like a peasant.

Delightful.

It took him probably twenty minutes to remember that cell phones were a thing, and that he had one. _Still_ had one, as the case was, as it was sat comfortably in his pocket, nestled in a tiny pool of sand that had crept in while he wasn't looking. That probably wasn't good for the charging port, which actually sucked quite a bit, because he was fairly certain that his phone was dead. Either that, or overheated. In any case, it wasn't turning on, making it about as useful as pancake mix in the middle of the ocean.

How come cell phones weren't charged by solar power yet? Why wasn't that a thing? First thing he was going to do when he got back to Los Angeles was call the patent office.

Well. Best make that the fifth or sixth thing he did.

Finding whoever had dumped him in the middle of the desert should probably take priority, because the more he thought about the night before, the more he remembered, and the clearer it became; there had been no party. He could remember sitting in the hospital, checking in on his dear doctor after she had been caught between the celestial family grudge match that he had dragged her into. Doctor Linda Martin, Therapist to the Literal First Family. He could remember seeing her, so bloody and beaten, and could remember that seething rage that had simmered in his chest.

He could remember, in much too vivid of detail, the phone call that he had made afterwards; could remember how his throat had tightened and how his heart had decided its normal tempo wasn't interesting enough. He could remember the voicemail he had left, word for word.

He peered at the sun again, guessing the time since he had left that message; at _least_ fourteen hours, if not more. Probably more, knowing his luck.

Oh, Father above, Chloe was going to think that he had skipped out on her again, and was definitely going to skin him alive.

Well, the joke was on her, because the sun had already beaten her to that. So. Ha. Take that. Never mind the fact that he was kind of technically the victim here. _He_ was the one that had been knocked out and shuttled off into the middle of the desert.

He could remember the feeling of something striking the back of his head, too. He could count the number of times he had been knocked out like that on one hand. Well, two now, he supposed. It didn't happen often, mostly because it was so difficult to do. Someone had to swing _really_ hard to make his brain throw in the towel for a couple hours. Someone had to be really strong; _supernaturally_ strong.

 _'Amenadiel, if this was your doing, I'm going to rip out your spleen and make a hat out of it.'_

He shoved the thought along towards his brother, wrapped up in a nice little bow to make it a pretty prayer. If his time powers were returning, maybe he could get those again? Even if not, the threat was surprisingly cathartic.

After a moment of deliberation, he added, _'Ditto for Maze.'_

That still didn't explain the wing thing, though, the incessant ache making it impossible to ignore them like he had planned. Neither a fallen angel nor a demon had the ability to return his wings or gift him with new ones. Only his Father—and other angels by proxy, technically—had the power to do that.

But why would He? What had he done that made him deserving of this? It couldn't be that he had earned them back because of his act of mercy towards his Mother. If it was something as simple as that, wouldn't dying for a mortal carry more weight? If that hadn't been enough to regain this aspect of divinity, why would finding a loophole in a contract with God Himself count? He didn't dare consider the possibility that he had actually been _forgiven,_ because that just didn't happen. Divine creatures did not have the power to pray and have their sins wiped clean. That was a uniquely human trait. Maybe he should have asked for that, rather than free will.

And oh, look, he was thinking about the wings again. Lovely.

There had to be a road out in the desert somewhere that would allow him to drive away from these ideas and thoughts.

An hour later, and not only had he yet to come across a road, but he was also pissed off and thirsty as hell. Celestial beings couldn't actually die from dehydration, but enough weird crap had been happening lately that he wasn't entirely sure that was the case anymore.

Whatever he was feeling, he could believe that it was dehydration. His tongue had yet to come unstuck, instead feeling heavier than it had before. He wouldn't have been surprised if he found a brick surgically implanted where his tongue was supposed to be. That would be disappointing for him, though. What was he supposed to do with a brick for a tongue?

Everything spun around him in a dizzying blur of color; like an acid trip, but a lot less fun. He felt like he was on a ship in the middle of a sea storm, swaying on great waves that tilted the horizon and spiked his vestibular sense directly into a wall. He knew he was weaving all over the place; he had to be. There was no other way he could possibly be managing to stumble over every single desert shrub he was coming across.

If anybody asked later, he would vehemently deny the amount of times that he tripped.

Oh, look now and behold the Lord of Darkness, felled by a tiny plant.

He would never hear the end of it.

Another hour, and he was considering just biting a cactus to try and drink the water inside. That was how that worked, right? He had already tried to use the sharp primaries at the ends of his wings to slice through them, but that had been an absolute train wreck. Bending his wings like that required precision, and a degree of muscular control that was definitely not happening.

All he had managed to do was smack the cactus he had found with the broadside of his wing, crushing the poor plant and spilling any water within out onto the scorching sands. He had thought about picking up the pieces and licking them for water, but he had been of sound enough mind to decide that getting needles stuck in his tongue would do nothing to improve his mood.

After that, time became a bit muddied, like California's mountain roads during landslide season. The minutes slammed forward or lagged back at random intervals. At one point, he picked a distant Joshua tree to gauge how fast he was covering ground. On one blink it was a rippling smudge on the horizon, and on the next, he was staring up at the bayonet-shaped leaves just out of reach, wondering if they would be able to pierce the next cactus he found.

It had to be centuries old by that point, stubbornly thriving in an environment where God had done His level best to make success impossible.

 _'You and me both, mate.'_

Putting his back to the rugged survivor, it _had_ to have taken him three decades to put fifty measly feet between them.

His attention lapsed for what felt like a second, but it was enough time for the sun to swing around above his head and blind him with its Cheshire grin. It cackled as it sank behind the mountains, flipping him the bird with its last rays of light as the sky darkened and the farther stars blinked awake, raising eyebrows at his predicament. Yeah, he didn't get it, either.

None of them offered him aid, which he found to be quite rude.

 _'Okay, Amenadiel? I take it back. You can keep your spleen. Just help a brother out and come pick me up.'_ He paused, thinking. _'Oh. Be an angel and bring the Macallan 30.'_

With the day he was having, he was prepared to chug the entire bottle.

At least the chilly night wind soothed his burnt flesh, rather than irritate it further. He liked to look on the bright side.

Something a little ways off caught his eye. He would have broken into a sprint, if he didn't already feel like his tromping shuffle was too much movement.

There, waiting beneath a twisting Joshua tree with a bottle of he-didn't-care in one hand—he would take cooking wine at this point—and a new shirt in the other, was _Chloe._

His eyes burned like he should of been tearing up, but his face remained painfully dry.

He tried to call her name, he really did, but all that came out was a rattling croak that hurt his throat something awful, as if he had thrown back a shot of lighter fluid and then snacked on a lit match.

She smiled brightly at him, and the relief that flooded him made his body so light, the ache in his back was momentarily abated. She wasn't mad at him for not showing up. No, she had come to _help_ him. What a wonderful woman she was. She deserved everything. Like the truth.

First thing, though, was the biggest hug he had ever given.

Instead of wrapping his arms around her and breathing in her unique scent of lilac and gun grease, he rammed face-first into the trunk of the Joshua tree, his teeth cutting into the inside of his mouth.

He fell backwards, landed on his wings—and _damn_ did that hurt—and smiled wanly at the stars above.

No, that would have been much too easy.

He thought about just laying there and waiting for...whatever, but a jolt of pain through his back had him sitting up in an instant. Once he was that far, he figured he might as well get up and keep going.

The moon was directly overhead—not bragging like the sun, but silently tutting at him in disapproval, the judgmental bitch—when his next visitor bounced up alongside him.

"Hello, brother."

 _'Goodbye, Uriel,'_ he had _wanted_ to say as he picked up his pace, but the rough approximation of those words that he managed were pitiful and incomprehensible at best. He thought he had gotten over this guilt. Perhaps parting with the last thing Uriel carried—Azrael's blade—had hit him harder than he had anticipated. For all intents and purposes, he had thrown out his dead brother's final possession. _'Like yesterday's rubbish.'_

Oh. _Oh._ His sister was probably going to be _pissed._ He hadn't actually thought about that until now.

Uriel still strode alongside him. Lovely.

"You have your wings back," Uriel observed; always stating the obvious. "Aren't you going to thank me?"

 _'You had nothing to do with this,'_ he thought, unintentionally bundling the words into a prayer that drifted away across the sands like a tumbleweed. What happened to prayers sent to angels that had been wiped from existence, anyway? They carried the word of a thought but the power of a prayer, with no receiver to close the connection; an open-ended font of power that traveled freely without a cork to stop it. That seemed dangerous.

"Oh, but didn't I?" Uriel asked, much too lively for somebody that was much too dead. "I'm the Angel of Patterns, in case all those years in Hell boiled your brain and made you forget."

How could he forget when Uriel constantly reminded him? He hadn't actually thought that—too little energy to spare on a thought like that—but Uriel got the message anyway.

"Oh, Luci. I see all of the patterns, remember? Drop a napkin in Indiana, and a building collapses in India." So pompous, Uriel. So confident; too confident. "All events hit against one another, falling one by one into the next, like dominoes."

 _'I hate dominoes.'_ Whoops, and there goes another prayer, drifting away. He tried to snatch it back, because that was energy that he couldn't waste. But it was gone already, useless without a destination.

But no, it had a destination. Uriel was _right there._

No. Shit. He was dead, right? He wasn't going to fall into the same trap again.

Wait, what trap? There were no traps. And he wasn't falling. That was a long time ago. Or yesterday, maybe.

What was he talking about? Who was he talking _to?_

Oh, right. Uriel was there. That was pretty cool. Uriel looked a lot happier without a sword in his gut. Where had that sword gotten off to, anyway?

Uriel just kept on talking, his face twisting as blood stained the front of his vest and poured out of his mouth to paint his chin. That probably tasted awful. "Perhaps my death was just one domino in a long line of them. A necessity, if a rather unfortunate one. My death brought you the first piece of the sword, my words helped lead you to the rest, and the assembled sword was what gave you the choice that led you here," Uriel said, spreading his hands to gesture to the desert around them.

 _'Here?'_ he echoed. _'There? Where?'_ His eyes rolled around, looking for a landmark. Certainly wasn't Heaven; he wasn't allowed there anymore. _'Hell? Purgatory? Sheephole Valley?'_ That place was supposed to be awfully hot this time of year. It was a bit nippy. A shirt would have been nice. All he had were his defective wings; not a very good substitute.

Wings? Oh _right._ Stuff had happened.

 _'Your death was not part of this,'_ he insisted, more to himself than his phantom brother. _'This was not one of your patterns. If you saw your death coming, why would you allow it?'_

"To help you on your path, brother. And what a wondrous path it is."

Everything about him hurt. He frowned. _'My "path" is not worth your life.'_

Uriel smiled, crumpling in on himself and shrinking. Bye, Uriel. "Perhaps you believe that now, brother, because you cannot see your destination. You cannot see the _pattern_."

And then Uriel was gone, folding and stretching, like taffy on a pulling machine at the fair. What a disgusting flavor. Too many feathers for his liking.

He didn't get taffy, though. He got a hellhound, which stopped and stood its ground, staring at him. He stopped, too. He had had enough. His brain had chugged along—slow as it was—and formed conclusions at long last. Mirages were stupid; hallucinations were even more so.

He swung an arm through the hellhound, intent on dispelling the image. It might not have been real, but even the ghost of eyes watching him was unnerving.

It leapt, and latched onto his wrist with dagger-like teeth because _holy shit_ that thing was not a hallucination.

Not a hellhound, either, as its teeth didn't pierce his flesh—although the scraping of fangs along his open sores sure stung—so maybe a half-hallucination.

He punched the dusty coyote with all he had, which was admittedly not much. So he showed it the damage that a divine Fall could do, and flared his wings—oh, what marvelous things instinctive muscle memory could accomplish—and _roared_ in a way that no other creature could.

Speaking was out of the question, but snarling with the sound of one thousand rabid panthers never was.

The coyote turned tail and fled faster than he could figure out how to resettle his wings. Again.

His trek after the overgrown rat had fled was remarkably boring and quiet. He almost missed the vivid hallucinations, which had at least offered him company and broken up the monotony. He remained as lucid as he possibly could, too, just in case the coyote came back with friends. He didn't have to worry about becoming a late night snack for a pack of mangy canids like a wayward mortal would—because of his relative immortality and all—but he was already in a rotten enough mood, and he didn't think the muscles in his torso would accept another flare of the wings. They were already starting to whisper of mutiny, their displeasure making him twitchy.

He didn't even notice at first when the sliding sands beneath his bare feet solidified into a rough, stabbing slab. It radiated the residual heat of day into the cool night air, which almost made up for the fact that the ground was currently attacking his feet with tiny, dull knives. Or gravel. It was probably gravel, since he stood on a road.

A _road._ At last. Civilization. _Progress._ A nice two-lane highway, smack dab in the middle of the desert, snaking away between the dunes and mountains.

He ground his toes experimentally into the gravel on the road's shoulder, waiting to see if it too was a hallucination that would reveal its deception after a bit of scrutiny. The road stayed a road, and he stayed standing at its edge, staring blankly at it like an idiot.

At least he had a less-than-vague direction to walk in now. Before, he had just guessed. Now he could make an _educated_ guess. There was a tiny, minuscule difference.

Which way was home, though? Or did the road not even lead towards home? He still had no idea where he was. Maybe home was away from the road, and deeper into the desert. Maybe if he followed the road, he would never get back to Los Angeles. Chloe said that happened, sometimes; people would walk away from their homes, and just never come back again. Those were mostly children or older people, she had said. He was kind of like an old person, right? One of the oldest, by human standards. But he looked young, and acted young, and felt young. Did that exclude him from that? He should have asked Chloe more questions before getting lost in the desert.

Bright lights blazed to life and drew nearer, like fallen stars that rushed towards him. Perhaps some of the stars in the sky had finally taken pity on their creator, and were coming to his aid. He didn't know what stars could do to help, but he appreciated the sentiment. Maybe they would be better conversationalists than hallucinations of murdered brothers that loved to lecture, or real coyotes that saw his feathers and mistook him for a roadrunner.

No, no wait. The hallucinations were back. Wonderful. Why else would Maze be riding those too-bright stars that growled and rumbled like hellhounds?

"Lucifer!"

Maze rushed up to meet him, but hesitated on her toes just out of arms reach, her eyes wide as she worried her bottom lip between her teeth. She looked like the result of concern and anger being thrown into a mixing bowl, garnished with disbelief. Add salt to taste.

"What the hell?"

 _'No no no, not Hell,'_ he thought. Too bad hallucinations and demons couldn't get prayers. _'Gravity. See?'_ He tried to lift his wings to demonstrate, but his muscles moaned in protest—or was that actually just him?—and gave out, the weight of the feathers and flesh and bone dragging him down along with them. So his demonstration had _kind_ of worked, because gravity dumping his ass on the ground proved his point well enough.

Maze reached out a hand towards him, but then Amenadiel was there, all tall and imposing, and the demon hesitated, looking to him when he said, "I don't understand."

 _'Oh what a surprise,'_ he thought. And then, wrapping up his words into a prayer that he lobbed towards the sky, he thought, _'Hey, brother, your hallucination is better looking than you!'_

Amenadiel's eyebrows raised and then furrowed again, his head tilting to the side. "Hallucination...?" Understanding dawned, and Amenadiel crouched down to his level. When had he gotten so small? "Brother, I-" Maze elbowed him, hard. " _We_ are no hallucination."

"You bet your ass we're not," Maze snorted, tossing her hair over her shoulder with a snapping flick of her wrist. "Do you have any idea how long we've been looking for you? You've got an assload of explaining to do." Her eyes trailed to and lingered on his wings again. "Make that a metric shit ton."

Yeah, he wished he had an explanation for that one, too.

He blinked at the two slowly, his vision fuzzy. He reached out with a cautious hand, weary of being attacked by another disguised danger, and jabbed Amenadiel in the knee. Instead of snapping fangs or lashing claws, his fingers hit cool denim. So unless the desert fauna had suddenly developed a fashion sense...

He opened his mouth to speak, and croaked like a bullfrog. Maze immediately offered a flask, which Amenadiel smacked away with a reproachful glare.

"Alcohol won't help his throat," Amenadiel admonished. Maybe not, but it would help his mood.

Instead, a bottle of water was offered, with the instruction to take small sips, unless he wanted to throw it all back up.

After a few gulping mouthfuls that left him the tiniest bit nauseous—he was nothing if not a rebel—his vocal cords no longer felt in danger of rending apart when he tried to speak; they still twisted and grated against one another painfully, but he could work with that. "How...?" Okay, _kind_ of work with that.

But Amenadiel got the message, just as he had gotten the prayers; every single one that had been sent, whether to him or not. Apparently directionless prayers could be intercepted by any angel, even the fallen-but-maybe-not-anymore ones. That was something to remember for later.

Tracking him down via the prayers had been a bit trickier.

"You mentioned Sheephole Valley in one, so we came straight here."

Was that where he was? He vaguely remembered mentioning that. Maybe his sense of direction on the Mortal Plane was better than he had thought.

He took another sip of his water. It was dreadfully bland. He formed another prayer, carefully addressing it for his brother this time. _'Don't suppose either of you brought any Cognac?'_ Maze raised her eyebrow and the flask, both of which Amenadiel shot down again. Well, maybe his brother shouldn't have bothered "translating" the prayer, then. _'A shirt? Aloe vera?'_

"We've got a blanket in the car," Maze offered with a shrug.

That was good enough for him.

Cramming into Maze's car was...interesting. The back seat wasn't designed for a tall man with even taller wings. But they would make do. They had to, with a three-hour car ride ahead of them.

Once on the road, one wing covering him to muffle the whispered conversations between angel and demon in the front seats—discussing him, as if he wasn't sitting _right there_ —the tension finally bled out from his sore and wailing body.

There was still so much to do, so much to figure out. Like who had dropped him in the desert, why he had his wings back, and _holy shit, what was he supposed to do about and say to Chloe now?_

The Devil did _not_ do fainting.

So he took an abrupt nap instead.

He could deal with everything else later.

* * *

A/N: Originally posted on AO3 on 6/7/2017 under the same handle. I'll upload more chapters soon, hopefully!


	2. Phase Two

And on the seventh day, Lucifer called bullshit.

There was _no reason_ as to why he shouldn't be able to figure this out. It was _simple_. Not only that, but he'd had _practice._ Decades of it. _Millennia._

All of which summed up to absolute jack shit.

All he had been able to manage was a vague impression of a quilt sewn by a geriatric blind dog with carpal tunnel. He was a patchwork, uneven chunks of tanned flesh torn away to reveal the hellish scars beneath.

His wings were worse. They were like a glitching video, shuddering and flickering around the edges. Entire portions were invisible as if smeared away by a divine eraser. They looked more like they were made of Swiss cheese, rather than solid light and divine power contained by a few deceptive feathers.

He had been trying to _hide_ his wings, but all this did was draw more attention to them. And it was all he had to show for seven days of work.

Though, to be fair, that wasn't _all_ he had been doing over the week since returning to Los Angeles.

The first day, he had done nothing but sleep, which was wildly inconvenient and strange, considering he had already slept the past eleven days away.

That one had thrown him for a loop.

Amenadiel, wielding Google like a pro, had calmed a panicky Maze when they hadn't been able to rouse Lucifer from his slumber upon their arrival at Lux. Dehydration, he informed her, made people sleepy. Since his dear brother could never just do something halfway and had gone and gotten himself celestially dehydrated—Lucifer preferred 'hellishly'—it was to be expected that he would need a considerable amount of rest.

So Lucifer had basically died for a day or so.

He felt like he was dying a lot recently.

And _holy Hell in a handbasket_ did he feel like absolute _shit_ when he woke up. If his nausea hadn't chained him to his bed, then the fact that every single muscle had rebelled and disconnected from his brain would have.

He felt like he was still stumbling through the desert, even while holding absolutely still. His legs obstinately refused to listen to his logic that, just because he was laying on Egyptian cotton, that did not mean he was actually walking _in_ Egypt, and they could stop telling him that they were going to keep buggering on over that next sand dune.

That was nothing compared to when he actually tried to stand up and get out of bed. It took forever and a half just to sit up and gather his legs beneath him, his burns stretching and hollering to make sure he hadn't forgotten them with each twitch. He continued to do his best to ignore them, even when they wouldn't _shut up._

He heaved himself to his feet with all the confidence of a surefooted stallion, and like a newborn colt, his legs buckled beneath him. He landed in a sprawling heap of tangled limbs and twisted wings, his vision briefly cutting out when his skull cracked against the floor.

He groaned, and cursed, and was fully prepared to just stay where he was, folded into a feathery pretzel until Gabriel flew through and announced the End of Times. But the cool floor stopped soothing his burns and started to pull on them instead to get him to move so that it no longer had to touch his broken and flaky flesh. Well, floor, he wasn't happy about the situation either.

He felt it had no right to complain, since _he_ was the one that had been dropped in the middle of the desert, and _it_ had been able to stay inside and hide away from the arrogant sun.

Abandoned like the latest project forgotten in an Easy-Bake Oven. How _insulting._

It took a full five minutes to finally haul himself back into bed, swearing and spitting all the while.

So Lucifer spent his second day home lying in bed, feeing miserable and sorry for himself.

On day three, Lucifer drank all of the water in his penthouse.

Amenadiel had been right; alcohol did nothing to help him. He tried that first, naturally, because fifteen days without something at least 80-proof made him a cranky Devil. All it did was tie his stomach in a knot and make him thirstier, and a whole hell of a lot crankier.

He mourned his inability to drink his whiskey for all of ten minutes before draining every bottle or jug of water he owned, including the seltzer water in Lux's inventory. He refused to drink tap water, because LA water was disgusting and tasted like rust, and he wasn't a _peasant._

He tried to inhale the pool, too. He had quickly remembered that chlorine was a thing that tasted awful, so he abandoned that plan right quick.

Maze had found it uproariously funny, and had cackled like a hyena all the way to the elevator. Her running to the store to get more water was appreciated, but he could have done without the mocking.

He could have also done without the two massive reasons he couldn't just go to the supermarket himself, which hovered over his shoulders like the world's most overbearing helicopter mom.

His fourth day home was when he _really_ buckled down and got to work on hiding his wings away.

That also meant that he spent a good deal of time doing a number of ridiculous stretches and exercises he hadn't had to do in _forever_ to build up the muscles in his back and chest again. Without them, his wings would slowly droop until they just dragged on the floor behind him, which would _definitely_ not fly.

Neither would he, without regaining his strength, but that was a very distant goal in his rehabilitation efforts.

He had wanted to just lob them off again and be done with them, but Maze had refused. When he first broached the subject with her, she had crossed her arms, turned her nose up at him, and promptly given her opinion on the matter.

"Fuck off."

Amenadiel hadn't even given him that much of an answer. He had just sighed into the phone and hung up.

So Lucifer had begrudgingly gotten on with his exercises.

It only took him that fourth day to get to the point where he didn't feel in danger of his wings sliding from their place against his back. His fine motor control was still pitiful, and actually _flying_ was still a ways away, but his rapid improvement had left him glowing with pride. All he had to do was figure out how to cloak them properly, and he would be back in business, both figuratively and literally.

"And then I can finally have my promised chat with the Detective," he had mused aloud on the fifth morning.

"Oh, yeah," Maze had called from where she had been lounging on his couch. She had been hanging around more recently, pinning him with the watchful eye of a mother hen as he slowly shuffled around the penthouse. She feared that the moment she looked away, he would be abducted again. Maybe the next time they wouldn't find him. That was not a risk she was willing to take. "When were you planning on telling her that you're, you know, not dead?"

Dread, meet Lucifer. Lucifer, Dread.

What a lovely couple.

Holy _shit_ was he a dead Devil walking.

His folly lay in his assumption that Maze had told Chloe that he was back in Los Angeles, more or less safe and sound, and that he had needed time to recover before seeing her.

Upon telling Maze this, she had raised an eyebrow and said, "That ain't my job."

It wasn't Amenadiel's job, either, even when Lucifer tried to make it so. Again his brother hadn't given much of an answer to the question; he had barked out a laugh before hanging up. Asshole.

Calling up the courage to leave Chloe that message sixteen days ago had been a test within itself. Calling her to tell her that not only was he alive, but that he had been back for five days already without telling her, felt insurmountable.

But he was the Devil, the King of Hell, the most powerful of God's angels. He could handle a phone call to one puny mortal.

So he dialed the phone, his jaw set.

It rang once.

Twice.

Thrice.

What came after "thrice"? Shit.

 _"_ _Hello?"_

He hung up, and hurled the phone off the balcony.

Maze had been _livid_ , because the phone lying in pieces twelve stories below was _hers._

So now he had two women pissed at him. Or one and a half, rather, since Chloe's anger was still a work in progress.

Oh well. No use crying over spilt milk, or whatever.

That saying made no sense. He would never weep over the bodily secretions of a postpartum bovine.

Any attempts to think up a better idiom were cut short when Maze returned to the penthouse, lugging along the landline from the management office downstairs. Like just about _everything_ Lucifer owned, it was sleek and glossy and black, the picture of luxurious living, but all Lucifer saw was a noose with which to hang himself.

Maze had dropped the phone next to him on the couch, the handset leaping from its dock to smack his thigh. He had blinked and glared at the device that would _dare_ strike him, but as it was a phone, it did not cower at his might. How foolish. He could melt it with hellfire, strip it of its coppery entrails, slowly scratch the display until it could not recognize itself in the mirror, _fling that bitch into the freaking sun-_

"You throw that one off the balcony, and I'm going to make sure you're right behind it."

The joke was on her; he could just _glide_ to safety.

Maze had apparently thought of that, too, without him needing to say it, because she had rolled her eyes and scoffed, "No, you couldn't."

And _shit_ , she was right. Just the thought of trying to brace his wings against his weight and the wind and the chaotic thermals that formed around taller buildings had sent a twinge of pain ricocheting around his spine. It was a bone-deep ache that said _ha, bitch, you wish,_ and had had him wincing and gritting his teeth, teetering on the edge of defeat.

But he had had one more last-ditch effort hidden up his sleeve.

 _'_ _Oh Aunt Mary! I'm hailing you! Full of whatever, our Lord is something-or-other, blessed art thou among I-don't-care.'_

With a smile that had ended many an argument, he had said, "There's no phone jack up here." He had specifically requested that the penthouse not have any. When first arriving topside, he had thought that phones were a stupid invention that he would have no need for, since he always brokered his deals face-to-face. There was hardly even an outlet in the place.

Maze had pursed her lips, and Lucifer had prepared to crow victory.

And then, the _killing blow._

"Yeah, I had the construction guys put one in, anyway."

Betrayal, thy name is Mazikeen.

Wait. That was kind of still a sore subject.

Maze had gotten the phone hooked up and returned to give him the handset, rapping it against his knuckles when he folded his hands across his stomach in a refusal to cooperate, and stared at her like the petulant child that he was.

"Stop being a baby," she had snapped, her eyes narrowed.

Perhaps they really _had_ been topside too long. His glare, which at one point would have had Maze groveling for forgiveness, just had her shaking the phone under his nose and questioning his manhood. _That_ sort of insult could not have gone ignored, so he had snatched the phone from her with a growl—which she had answered with an unimpressed snort—and had placed the call.

That conversation had probably been the third or fourth most nerve-wracking moment in his considerably-long life.

 _"_ _Maze? What's wrong? Your call disconnected earlier."_ He could just _hear_ her frown. _"Why're you calling from Lux?"_

"No, Detective. It's, uh, _me_." After a beat of silence that had stretched for too long, he added, "Lucifer Morningstar."

As if she needed any clarification.

He could have slapped himself. Of course it was him. How many faux-British people did Chloe talk to regularly? Why had he tacked on his chosen surname? And _what the shit,_ why were his palms so _sweaty?_

The choked sob that had echoed through the phone had made him frown.

 _'_ _Is she crying?'_ It sounded like it. _'What am I supposed to do?'_ What had Linda told him about _gently_ handling crying women?

'Don't lie but don't tell the truth' was the best he could remember at that moment, even though that was supposed to be used when a woman asked if she looked fat. What kind of Catch-22 bullshit was _that?_

Maybe it could still be applied, though. He had considered telling her that she looked nice, but had thought better of that, because he hadn't been able to see her. Maybe she looked as awful as he did. He had scrambled instead, still searching for an alternative.

"You seem well." Nice. _'Bloody hell.'_ Really nailed that one, Father of Silver-Tongues. "I'm well, as well," he had continued. Everything was going _great_. "Well, I'm not dead." _'Someone call Lassie. I appear to have gotten stuck.'_

Over the ten minutes of their phone call, Chloe had demonstrated a dizzying array of emotions, bouncing between them rapidly. All it proved to Lucifer was that human emotions—the _true_ spectrum of human emotion, and not whatever bastardized, infantile version Lucifer had begun to develop—were an inconvenience that made him want to back out of the room as quickly and quietly as possible.

She had been a little teary at first, and then ecstatic at his survival. And then came the burning anger that Lucifer could feel all the way from his penthouse.

It hadn't been a surprise, but it had still been wildly unpleasant. Even he, with his limited grasp on the human thought process, could understand where her rage was stemming from. He had apologized profusely, and done his best to explain the assumptions he had had, which had just led to another round of apologizing after Chloe had given a lecture on the dangers of assuming.

"I truly _am_ sorry, Detective, but I had quite a bit on my plate at the time!"

That had sobered Chloe right up, and _shit_ if he had known that was all it would take, he would have opened with _that._

After that had come the inevitable questions, and the unavoidable tension when he couldn't really answer most of them. He had felt like he was getting interviewed as an eyewitness, which was a lot less fun than he had originally thought.

He couldn't explain who had taken him, or why, or how he had managed to lose eleven entire days. The best he could give her was where he had regained consciousness and if there was anything he could recall from the scene—"Half a day's shuffle out into the Sheephole Valley Wilderness", and "Sand, heat, and the sack-of-ass sun".

And, of course, there had been one other thing he could remember from the scene of his reawakening.

He had discarded the idea about telling Chloe about the wings without a second thought. Not like she would have believed him without proof, anyway.

She had wanted to come over to see him right away; had already been on her way out of the precinct, in fact, when she told him.

"No!" he had barked, his voice leaping an octave. He cleared his throat. "No. I'm sorry, Detective, but I fear I'm in no shape to be entertaining company at the moment."

She had scoffed, the light and breathy sound pulling at something deep in his chest. _"I've seen worse, Lucifer."_

Crap. Of course she had. She was a _homicide detective._ Even if he told her that he had ripped his beating heart out and sprayed arterial red all over his flat, she would just throw on a poncho and take a seat on the couch. Any implied injuries, real or fake, wouldn't keep her away if she was on a mission.

Maze had swept in then, apparently tired of watching him flounder and drown in his own ineptitude.

"Decker," she had barked into the phone. "I wouldn't come here. Not yet. He got a little banged up and a little burned, not to mention the hit his ego took. He's being super whiny about it. _Really_ annoying."

Lucifer had clenched his jaw and remained silent, reminding himself that Maze was _helping._ Linda had told him a while back that snapping the tibia of someone that was helping him was considered rude.

Knowing Maze, she would probably find the broken bone—for however long it lasted—exhilarating and entertaining.

And like hell he wanted to deal with her retaliation at the moment.

"Yeah, no. He's fine. Amenadiel and I have been keeping an eye on him. He'll call you when he's up for taking visitors." Maze had paused then, her nose wrinkling at whatever Chloe had said. "Just bring the forms home. I'll swing by and pick them up later, and have him fill them out." She had hung up then, tossing the phone over her shoulder with a careless flick of her wrist. It had outlived its usefulness. "There. Bought you a few days to get your shit together. You're welcome."

Lucifer had done his best to ignore the sinking feeling that tugged at his lungs and throat at her mention of those coming days.

But Maze had had a point. Getting his shit together would be a good 'phase two' in his Operation.

Which led him to his final days of his week back to L.A.

And _boy howdy_ wasn't he just _pissed_ at how easy Amenadiel had made it look to hide his wings.

The concept in and of itself was simple: Extend the glamour that covered his devilish side to cloak his wings.

He was good at that; frightfully good, in his opinion. Usually, a glamour could be peered through, provided one knew the glamour was there and was willing to put in the effort and deal with the headache afterwards. It was why angels were able to pick out demons from a crowd, no matter how well disguised they were.

Lucifer was better than the average demon. He had spent _centuries_ perfecting his glamour, until not even his own Father could peek through that veil. The air around him still carried the light taste of magic and illusion, but only creatures truly in touch with their instincts could even get enough of an inkling of it to become discomforted by his presence.

He was, after all, named the Master of Lies for a reason. The face that he saw every day in the mirror—that he wore like a shield, even to defend against himself—was the closest thing to a lie that he had ever told.

So even though he had only ever used glamour to cover rather than delete—like a heavy-duty concealer that cost half a month's rent, rather than some dime store Pink Pearl that had already been chewed on by unsupervised toddlers—it should have been _easy._

But it wasn't.

It was like he was trying to stretch a Queen-sized sheet to fit a California King. For every inch of wing his glamour wiped away, another inch of his burned flesh peaked out to taunt him.

For three days, he had struggled to shift things around and make compromises. He had tried limiting his human appearance in some areas to try and make room for his wings, but he found that an incomplete glamour was prone to shuddering and failing at the worst of times.

That poor cashier from the shop down the road would never be the same after the handsome man suddenly became the thing of nightmares after he realized he had forgotten his wallet.

So that test run had revealed a few bugs.

By the middle of the seventh day, he accepted that the glamour wasn't working. Every time he got two corners of the sheet to stay in place, the others would slip free and snap him in the back of the head.

' _That's it. I'm calling bullshit.'_

Amenadiel did not appreciate his new name.

"Just _help me,_ brother," he pleaded. And then, with a smug grin and a twirling prayer, ' _Lest I haunt your dreams.'_

Prayers would not be ignored, so neither would he, dammit.

There were so many more avenues of torture he could take via prayer other than a simple dream hijack.

He could send graphic replays of all his late-night rendezvous, could transmit an endless stream of puns and knock-knock jokes about angels and Heaven, could sing "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" on loop for eternity— _constantly_ half a step sharp on _every note-_

" _Fine_."

Oh.

Honestly, Lucifer was a little disappointed.

It had taken Lucifer seven days to swallow his pride and ask his brother for help. And he seriously regretted not just getting over that shit and asking sooner, because it took all of two minutes for Amenadiel to point out what the problem was.

Lucifer had shown his brother the results of him trying to cram his wings beneath a shoddy illusion, his eyebrows raised in a gesture welcoming advice.

"Luci." Amenadiel blinked. "You're trying to glamour your wings."

Lucifer rolled his eyes, because _no shit, Amenalock._ He frowned. _'Sherladiel?'_

"Luci, angels can't _do_ glamours."

He ruffled and puffed up his feathers like the prideful little bird he was. Yes, _regular_ angels couldn't manage the complexity of a glamour. _Plebeians._ But he was no second-class angel. He had been an archangel; not only that, but the most powerful of them all, perhaps only equaled by Michael. The ability to create a glamour was an _infernal_ one, so _of course_ no weak-ass _angels_ could pull off something so impressive-

Lucifer froze.

Glamours were infernal.

Angel wings were _divine._

Father above, he was an idiot.

"A glamour and your wings…they're like oil and water," Amenadiel continued, as if Lucifer hadn't already _gotten that._

"Okay, well, I've seen _you_ walking around without your wings." He still _was_ , technically. And Lucifer had seen other angels since his Fall without their wings hovering over their shoulders. Like Uriel, for one. "I know you lot haven't been cutting them off and reattaching them." That seemed much too tedious and time-consuming, and Maze had already made it clear that her days as an amputation amateur were over.

Amenadiel frowned, his forehead creasing with confusion. After a moment, the wrinkles smoothed out, migrating down to the corners of his eyes as he looked on with pity. Lucifer _hated_ that; he could just _feel_ the stare burning into his flesh.

"Of course. You wouldn't know."

"'Know' what?" Lucifer demanded with an impatient tap of his foot. If Amenadiel was going to keep beating around the bush, Lucifer was just going to light it on fire.

"When the humans were more devout, we didn't have to hide that symbol of our divinity and our Father's love. Disguising our angelic nature is a more…recent development."

"Meaning after Dad kicked me out." Any skill or ability or whatever developed after that was one he would never have learned. Wonderful. "Well? Don't be stingy. How's it done?"

Amenadiel rolled his shoulders, chewing on his lip as he considered his words. "You kind of just…compress the space around them. And then put on a shirt."

Lucifer blinked. Amenadiel blinked. Maze, who had been watching the discussion with far too much enjoyment for the general discomfort in the room, also blinked.

"What kind of sci-fi bullshit are you feeding me, brother?"

As it turned out, Amenadiel had not brought a tray of freshly-baked sci-fi bullshit. He hadn't been making an attempt at a joke. He had proved it by removing his own shirt, the tattered remains of wings impossibly fitting beneath the thin fabric; not a feather poking beneath a hem, or a noticeable lump altering his shadow.

Amenadiel winced, shamed by the grotesqueness of what had once been so beautiful. Lucifer made a point of not allowing his eyes to linger on them, not only to spare his brother, but because they looked too much like how what had remained of his first pair of wings had looked before he had rid himself of their uselessness; nigh featherless, and emaciated, and rotting and _agonizing-_

Nope. Not going to go there.

Lucifer cleared his throat.

"How's that supposed to work, then?"

The seventh day was awful, perhaps even more so than all the others before it. _So many shirts_ were lost with even the barest lapse in attention. Eons of practice with his glamour had left Lucifer with the skill to keep a firm grasp on it, even when entirely unconscious. This new skill ran through his fingers like water if he so much as _breathed_ differently.

Maze and Amenadiel had taken great joy in his frustration.

His thousands of dollars-worth of wardrobe—the shredded remnants of which lay scattered about the penthouse, like the casualties of a particularly vengeful moth—certainly did _not._

The seventh _night_ since his return, however, was different.

The patrons of Lux were treated to something that had rapidly become unheard of over the past week and a half, causing a rapid decline in clientele and revenue.

 _'_ _Well, that just won't do.'_

He did, after all, have a _lot_ of seltzer water he would need the income to be repurchasing.

Also, a truly impressive number of shirts.

At a quarter past eleven, eighteen days after Lucifer had become a no-show in his own establishment, he stepped out onto the club floor, adjusting his cufflinks like a parakeet would preen its feathers.

A regular customer, already well on her way to becoming much too intoxicated, stumbled towards him with a lilting cry of his name. The tips of her fingers had just barely brushed the back of his blazer when he spun around, snatching up her wrist in a lightning-fast grip that would only be ignored because the woman's eyeballs were floating around her skull in a pool of her choice drink; in her defense, _everything_ around her seemed to be moving at a rapid pace.

Lucifer grinned, the expression so disarming and sickeningly sweet, it could have given cavities to a rock. "Carla!" His wings resettled, plastered against his back in a hold that Amenadiel had insisted was much tighter than required. But _screw that feathered jerk,_ it made Lucifer feel more in control. He adjusted his hold on the compression, willing space to stay folded and listening to his whims; the son of a bitch was _slippery._ "How are you, darling?"

He led the woman over towards the bar, intent on getting himself a stiff drink to steady his hand and nerves, just a firm touch along his spine away from having a colossal amount of shit hit an industrial-sized fan.

This was his final test run, and provided everything went smoothly…

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow he would go see Chloe.


End file.
